Mugabe to take over Zimbabwean banks, mines
President Robert Mugabe is preparing to take over key businesses in mining, banking and manufacturing as his international isolation deepens, two members of the ruling party’s politburo said. The 84-year-old leader said two days ago that he may form an “Economic Revolutionary Council” to overcome sanctions, the officials said. They declined to be identified because the talks of his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party two days ago weren’t public. Meantime, a South Africa opposition party called for African nations to join the sanctions. Mugabe’s plans suggest he doesn’t intend to bow to calls to step down as the economy collapses and cholera spreads. The top U.S. envoy to Africa, Jendayi Frazer, said Dec. 21 that Mugabe has “lost it.” Zimbabwe is in its 10th year of recession, with an annual inflation rate of more 230 million percent and an unemployment rate more than 80 percent. “We are seeing the endgame,” Marian Tupy, an Africa analyst at the Washington- based Cato Institute, said yesterday. “It’s an indication of how short of money Mugabe is.”

The emergency measures would seek to curb inflation and lift productivity, which has slumped to less than 10 percent of manufacturing capacity, the officials said after the meeting in the northeastern town of Bindura. These may include nationalizing banks, mines and factories and could go as far as declaring a state of emergency, they said. “President Mugabe has said that Zimbabwe needs an economic revolution to counter the effects of illegal sanctions imposed by the dying Bush regime and Britain,” George Charamba, a spokesman for the Zimbabwean leader, said in an interview from Harare today. “Now we hear that Bush’s administration wants to step up those illegal sanctions.

Must we sit and watch that happen as a sovereign country.” He declined to say whether there were plans to nationalize companies. While Zimbabwe is not the subject of formal economic sanctions, the U.S. and the European Union have imposed travel bans and asset freezes on Mugabe and his allies. Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd., the world’s secondbiggest platinum producer, and Rio Tinto Group, the world’s third- largest mining company, own assets in the country. Barclays Bank Plc and Standard Chartered Plc operate in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean government has already said it plans to force foreign companies to sell 51 per cent of their assets to black Zimbabweans.

It has yet to implement that decision. “Mugabe is the elected president of the Republic of Zimbabwe and is free to propose any economic reform, revolutionary or otherwise,” Charamba said. Mugabe has resisted a power-sharing agreement brokered by former South African President Thabo Mbeki in September after presidential run-off elections in June were boycotted by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Talks over enacting the deal have stalled because of his refusal to give up key ministries.

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